S. Muller & Sons founded in 1955 is now a world-renowned diamond manufacturer managed by the third generation of diamantaires led by Jean Claude Muller, the company’s CEO. S. Muller & Sons has an in-house diamond factory, one of the few that still remain in Antwerp, which is producing the now famous Hearts & Arrows Diamonds. The company’s involvement in Hearts & Arrows initiated with its relationship with Mr. Takanori Tamura, the inventor of the Eight-Star Diamond. While attending the Antwerp Diamond Trade Fair last February, our correspondents – helped by the Antwerp World Diamond Centre and S. Muller & Sons - took an opportunity to visit the company’s diamond factory, which resulted in the interview with Jean Claude Muller below.

De Beers and the Namibian government have been negotiating over a new diamond-sales agreement for quite some time now. The envisaged new deal would replace a 2007 agreement that allowed De Beers to sell the stones through the Namibia Diamond Trading Company (NDTC), a joint venture between Windhoek and De Beers. Namibia’s mines and energy minister Isak Katali told Rough & Polished’s Mathew Nyaungwa on the sidelines of a mining conference in Cape Town recently that the negotiations are now envisaged to end in June this year, if not earlier.

The gemmological education is very important for the industry to build a sound and strong edifice

The Gemmological Institute of India (GII) plays an important role in the local diamond industry, offering a broad range of services, which include diamond grading and certification, detection of diamond treatments and identification of synthetic diamonds, as well as research and gemological education courses highly popular and widely recognized in the trade in India and abroad having trained more than 5,000 students. The GII runs the only gem and diamond-testing laboratory in Mumbai fully equipped with state-of-the-art instruments. Bakul Mehta, Chairman of the GII, answers the questions from Rough&Polished in the exclusive interview below.

Petra Diamonds said exploration work at kimberlite KX36, which is situated in its Kukama East project area, in central Botswana has shown strong micro diamond results.
It said in a statement emailed to Rough & Polished that 250 diamonds, collectively weighing 0.756 carats, had been recovered from 403.88kg of kimberlite.
The largest diamond was a white, transparent dodecahedron, weighing 0.393 carats, it said.
"These initial drilling and microdiamond analysis results indicate that kimberlite KX36 has significant potential, in terms of its possible size, diamond grade and potential coarse diamond size frequency distribution,” said Petra chief executive Johan Dippenaar.
“The next step is a large diameter bulk sampling drilling programme, commencing in April 2012, in order to obtain further information with regards to grade and an indication of diamond value."
Company technical director Jim Davidson also said that the strong micro diamond results and the favourable coarser diamond size indications for kimberlite KX36 were most encouraging out of the five new kimberlites they had found in Botswana so far.
KX36 was approximately 60km from the nearest known kimberlite, meaning there was the potential for KX36 to be part of a new kimberlite field, he said.

Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished, from Zimbabwe